In these experiments, we lead a Dragon and Cat team-up, brought together by the power of Auras; then, we use Forests grown on the tomb of a dead god to fuel a nightmare filled with leeches.

That’s right: We’ll have two decks today. I had a couple different ideas for this week, but neither reached the full combo potential I usually look for in my content. Thus, I decided to present both of them to you, each picking up some of the other’s slack.

Brood Keeper

The first thought I had was to use Arcanum Wings and its unique aura swap keyword. With infinite mana and two copies of the Wings, we can make as many Dragon tokens as we want. Alternatively, with infinite mana, a Rancor, and a Tranquil Grove, we could repeatedly recast Rancor and make our Dragons that way. With infinite mana and a Felidar Umbra, we can just move said Umbra back and forth between a couple creatures and achieve our goal. There are a lot of silly options, and none of them really came together into the kind of deck I felt like building for today.

So instead, I decided to go less with combo and more with synergy by building a deck that can’t go infinite but that’s full of Auras and can still make plenty of tokens.

Pride of Dragons ? Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (13)
• 2 Nomad Mythmaker
• 3 Umbra Mystic
• 4 Ajani's Chosen
• 4 Brood Keeper

• Spells (23)
• 1 Remove Enchantments
• 1 Flickering Ward
• 1 Knightly Valor
• 1 Mantle of Leadership
• 2 Felidar Umbra
• 2 Flickerform
• 3 Unquestioned Authority
• 4 Chosen by Heliod
• 4 Dragon Mantle
• 4 Galvanic Arc

• Lands (24)
• 4 Mountain
• 4 Plains
• 4 Battlefield Forge
• 4 Clifftop Retreat
• 4 Rugged Prairie
• 4 Terramorphic Expanse

Buy This Deck

Ajani's Chosen joins Brood Keeper as a very similar card, giving us a token when an enchantment enters the battlefield under our control. That’s different with abilities such as Felidar Umbra’s, but it still works.

Flickering Ward lets us spend to make a Cat and/or a Dragon—each time we cast it and return it to our hand, we’re up a token or two, down 2 white mana, and otherwise back where we started.

Going along with this theme of Auras entering and leaving, I’ve included several Auras with enters-the-battlefield triggers. Dragon Mantle, Chosen by Heliod, Galvanic Arc, Unquestioned Authority, and Knightly Valor all have very beneficial triggers, and with Flickerform, we can reuse them repeatedly.

Mantle of Leadership gives us an interesting effect, and with Flickerform, it can create some very explosive turns. Awkwardly, if we Flickerform our Brood Keeper with a Mantle of Leadership and make a ton of tokens, it won’t be able to attack since it now has summoning sickness. Putting the Mantle on another creature would work, but that’s one fewer Aura for our Shaman. Consider an Emblem of the Warmind to avoid this problem—and to make all those Dragon and Cat tokens hasty.

I decided to give Remove Enchantments a shot here as well. It reads pretty awkwardly, but if I’m deciphering it correctly, it basically bounces all our Auras, and that means we’re able to recast them, benefiting from their enters-the-battlefield triggers and our faux-constellation triggers again.

Finally, a card I didn’t include but that may deserve a spot is Retether. I like my Retether decks to abuse the graveyard, but just running a couple for value in a deck full of Auras can’t be all that bad.

Nightmare

A card very similar to Nightmare is Journey into Nyx’s Squelching Leeches. It doesn’t have flying, but it costs 2 less, and with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, we’re not even limited to mono-black to make our 4-mana creature big (not that playing mono-black has been a liability these past several months). Finally, another card that’s quite good with Urborg (no, not Urborg) is Corrupt. Still legal for a few more months, this card will add quite a bit of power to our theme.

Somewhat for the irony, I decided to pair these black cards with Nissa, Worldwaker and her ability to untap Forests. Since I’ve decided to play two colors, I’ll already be banking on having an Urborg out, so we can play as many Forests for Nissa as we want, and with green ramp spells to support our scaling-by-number-of-Swamps creatures, we can try to ramp out some powerful stuff quickly.

Nightmare Forest ? M15 Casual Standard | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (15)
• 1 Genesis Hydra
• 1 Soul of Innistrad
• 1 Soul of Zendikar
• 4 Courser of Kruphix
• 4 Nightmare
• 4 Squelching Leeches

• Planeswalkers (4)
• 1 Garruk, Apex Predator
• 3 Nissa, Worldwaker

• Spells (16)
• 4 Putrefy
• 4 Corrupt
• 4 Nissa's Expedition
• 4 Font of Fertility

• Lands (25)
• 10 Forest
• 3 Swamp
• 4 Overgrown Tomb
• 4 Temple of Malady
• 4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Buy This Deck

Font of Fertility and Nissa's Expedition are both ways to power out Forests, which an Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth that we eventually reach will transform into hybrid Swamps.

Another element to Nissa that’s nice—and that’s kind of the dream—is to use her ultimate to make for huge, huge, Nightmares. I won’t admit that her ultimate is the real reason I wanted to play her here because it’s far too unlikely to ever happen, and when it does, it will just be a win-more effect.

But that was totally the reason.

Courser of Kruphix will let us play lands—and find Urborg—consistently while giving us a bunch of life and blocking power to work with, and Putrefy is a great removal spell that it just so happens we can play.

Of course, Standard has a ton of powerful black and/or green cards, but this composite of weaker ones could certainly be some fun.

Whether you prefer Dragons, Cats, Nightmares, or Leeches, you may just want to give one of these decks a try. (If you prefer Salamanders, sorry; I have nothing for you!)

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com